Society

Thursday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Ban smartphones for kids!

I understand the allure of smartphones, if you’re the parent of an adolescent (or younger) moron – which I believe many of you are. You have booked a nice table for Sunday lunch and would appreciate not having to engage your offspring in a dialogue of inanities regarding the things which most concern them at the present time: the wickedness of Great Britain, historically and indeed today; the wickedness of the generation which brought them into the world; their debilitating and unsightly skin issues; their plans for transitioning; their fear that by the time they are 20 they will not be able to afford to buy a flat in Belgravia

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 24 February 2024

‘I haven’t seen this before,’ began a recent email from my friend and frequent contributor Nick Sandqvist. That meant it would be a bit special, and it certainly was. Double game swings are not as rare as you may think: 4♥ making one way and 4♠ the other – usually with a double attached – happens every now and then. Rather more unusual though is that the same contract is bid and made at both tables by the same team! It was the third round of the EBU’s Online Teams League. Most good declarers today are technically highly proficient and play the hands with the odds. It is in the

Owen Matthews

Navalny’s final agony at the Polar Wolf gulag

One winter’s night before the Ukraine war, I was on a train that stopped at a remote station deep in the Russian arctic. It was late November. The mercury stood at 15 degrees below zero – the hard, dry frost of the far north. The train stood silent, wreathed in the coal smoke of the stoves that heated every carriage. The village’s name was Kharp. Though I did not know it at the time, Kharp is home to the FKU IK-3 penal colony, a Soviet-era arctic facility known as Polar Wolf where Alexei Navalny has just died. It was here that the Putin regime, with its rigid deafness to irony,

Matt Ridley

DNA profiling is a great British success story

Hardly a week goes by without a mention of DNA’s contribution to criminal justice. Last week Sandip Patel was convicted of killing a prostitute near Baker Street 30 years ago: DNA belatedly proved that his hairs were caught in her ring. A few days before, a double murderer, Colin Pitchfork, was controversially granted a parole hearing 36 years after being the defendant in ‘the first case of its kind in Britain to use DNA profiling’, as the Times put it. Only that’s wrong. Colin Pitchfork was not the first person in Britain to be convicted with DNA; he was the first person in the world. The story of how DNA

Melissa Kite

Why won’t Tesco bank let me change my address?

‘Thanks for calling Tesco bank,’ said the voice, before rather lavishly promising to get me to a member of the team who was going to help me. This wasn’t quite how it turned out, although I would say, up until the moment I asked to change my address I was a very satisfied customer. If any of these questions did not suit me, I would be allowed to object, he said, as though reading me my rights This credit card has a very reasonable interest rate, and a nice big limit. However, it has decided that I do not have the security clearance to change my address because I have

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The NHS says trans women should breastfeed babies. This is unforgivable

There are a fair few trans women – men who want to be seen as ladies – who long to breastfeed real babies, and some who actually give it a good go. A few years ago this would have seemed unthinkably surreal, but I’m afraid this is the new reality and you’ll just have to get used to it. A man who wants to breastfeed first takes hormones to grow breast tissue. Then he uses a technique adapted from something called the Newman-Goldfarb protocol, which was designed to help adoptive mothers breastfeed: he takes hormones and a hefty dose of an anti-nausea medication called domperidone and then begins an intense

Luke McShane

It’s a knockout

‘Chess is a sea in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe.’ I’m fond of that adage, which speaks to the depth of the game in a way that numbers cannot. But how many possible games of chess are there? The mathematician Claude Shannon wrote a paper in 1949: ‘Progamming a Computer for Playing Chess’, in which he estimated that there are at least 10120 (i.e. 1 with 120 zeros) possible games of chess. He noted that with such an astronomically large number, a perfect solution by brute force was infeasible. The reasoning is straightforward. The Dutch psychologist Adriaan De Groot (a contemporary of Shannon) estimated that a typical

Luke McShane

No. 789

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by M. Lokker, Shakhmatnaya Moskva, 1967 Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 26 February. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Bd3! Bxd3 2 Qd2# or 1…Rxd3 2 Qb1#. Last week’s winner Colin Ratledge, Leven, East Yorks

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: a bard’s-eye view of Leicester Square

In Competition No. 3337 you were invited to submit a soliloquy composed by Giovanni Fontana’s marble statue of Shakespeare, which has graced Leicester Square since 1874. Bill Greenwell, Alan Millard, Sylvia Fairley and Paul A. Freeman were star performers, but a standing ovation and £20 go to the winners below. Here stand I, with Lord Leicester’s patronage, Four-square, and can survey from every side, The life of London, multiplied and squared, Watching the things that change, yet do not change. Young ladies, and the not so young, still ply Love’s trade, but pliable young men now stir Remembrance-echoes in my marble breast, Aye, of the ale-house and theatre, too, Though

Lavatch

2642: A cipher to decode

The unclued lights (including one of three words, one of two words, two hyphened and one pair) have nothing in common. Across 11    Get sober people welcoming sober person home (6) 12    Litotes newspaper plugs seem so funny (7) 15    Poser’s strain (6) 18    Distributed case for delicate key (5) 19    Engineers, mature but not weak, assemble again (7) 23    Yale men amended hydrocarbon (7) 24    Dyes quiet clothing queen returned (6) 25    Scientist’s anxiety with traveller (8) 26    Relative admits unknown crime in legal institution (5,3) 27    Moan from Sun King, grabbing queen a whiskey (6) 28    Second judge computing speed (3-4) 33    A failing besetting a miser, ultimately?

The Spectator

2639: Spelling the End – solution

Prospero said ‘I’ll drown my book’ (The Tempest 5.1.56), illustrated by three volumes at the bottom of lake. First prize  Eleanor Morrall, Coseley, West Midlands Runners-up  Peter Marginson, Wilmslow, Cheshire; Roger Sherman, Richmond, Surrey

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Chelsea buns are the best of all buns

The Chelsea bun was first baked in the Bun House in Chelsea in the 18th century. It was a bakery which found particular favour with the Hanoverian royal family, as its pastries were reminiscent of those from whence they came. But these buns were for everyman: they were customarily bought by the poor on Good Friday along with hot cross buns. On these days, the demand was such that the buns were sold through an opening in the shutters, and a police presence was needed. The Bun House was headed up by Richard Hand who was known as ‘Captain Bun’; after his death, the shop passed on to one of

Toby Young Toby Young

My war reporter friend Sean should win a Bafta

My oldest friend, Sean Langan, was back in the news this week. He’s carved out a niche for himself as a maker of low-budget documentaries in conflict zones and his most recent film was shown on ITV on Monday night. He keeps costs down by shooting them himself on a hand-held camera, which isn’t easy given that he also stars in them. This involves holding a camcorder at arm’s length and pointing it at himself as he wanders through some of the world’s most dangerous hot spots, often in the midst of explosions and gunfire. He’s paid a heavy price for being a war correspondent with his finances suffering and

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Can England rain on Scotland’s Six Nations parade? 

Watching England play Wales in the Six Nations the other day, a lacklustre match between two middling sides and distinguished only by lashings of Welsh hwyl as the visitors outperformed their role as underdogs, I remarked to the Irish friend who was with me: ‘The Welsh don’t like the English, do they?’ ‘Get in line,’ my friend replied. Fair point, and the Scots, proud members in the queue and a better team than Wales, will sorely test the idea on Saturday that Steve Borthwick’s newish-look side are any better than their predecessors. Scotland are scarily good, prevented from beating France onlyby a blade of grass For some time it felt

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how can my daughter defy her friends and stay tattoo-less?

Q. My husband had my portrait painted for my 40th birthday and everyone says it is an amazing likeness. Now his business partner wants the same artist to capture his wife on canvas. We are anxious because, as my husband says, the wife is ‘no looker’ and the artist is not one to give a rose-tinted view of one of her sitters. Should we tactfully discourage this commission? – J.S., Northants A. Consider these words from one leading portraitist: ‘You want to reproduce the humanity, the character, rather than the appearance. Glamorous people are a nightmare to paint. As an artist I far prefer the “non-glamorous”. You can manipulate the

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

‘You can stare at a cow you will soon eat’: The Newt, Hadspen, reviewed

The Newt is an idealised country house in Somerset which won the World’s Best Boutique Hotel award last year. It is small, beautiful and mind-meltingly expensive, even for the Bruton Triangle and its mooing art galleries. Poor Somerset! It never wanted to be monied enough to have a triangle, but the rich make their own mythology. Since they paint every-thing grey – and now green, I learn at the Newt – they need it. A triangle fills the day. The Newt is for people who think that Babington House is stupid (it is) and though the Newt has its own issues – like the King, its taste is almost too

Dot Wordsworth

How do you say Southwell?

They were talking about the origins of the Bramley apple on The Kitchen Cabinet on the wireless last week, and naturally they spoke of Southwell, that agreeable minster town in Nottinghamshire. I was surprised, almost let down, when a local man pronounced the place-name to rhyme with mouthw’ll. I had long been careful to pronounce the –outh– like the –oth– in mother. I needn’t have been so shocked. The careful work of Klaus Forster published in 1981, A Pronouncing Dictionary of English Place-Names, includes a version of Southwell rhyming South– with mouth. Indeed it was the version, he tells us, listed in Broadcast English: Recommendations to announcers regarding the pronunciation

Robin Oakley

The joy of Tunbridge Ware trinkets 

Tunbridge Ware trinkets, toys and showpieces were the fridge magnets of their time; now they are the ultimate collectibles. When in the 18th and 19th centuries the aristocracy and middle classes travelled to Royal Tunbridge Wells for its curative waters, traders in West Kent saw an opportunity. The visitors needed souvenirs or gifts and with the forests of the Weald providing plentiful raw materials, turners and craftsmen started creating wooden objects decorated with veneered inlaid marquetry and intricate mosaics. Toyshops, print galleries and stationers began selling a variety of Tunbridge Ware items: cribbage boards, paperweights, yo-yos, glove boxes, playing-card and postage-stamp containers, jewellery cabinets and thimble cases. It was a

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Labour wins by-elections, Navalny dies and Eiffel Tower closes

Home Labour called for an ‘immediate humanitarian ceasefire’ in Gaza for the first time since the attack by Hamas in October. Earlier, at a Scottish Labour conference in Glasgow, Sir Keir Starmer said that a ‘ceasefire that lasts’ must ‘happen now’. The Prince of Wales called for an end to the fighting and the release of hostages, saying that ‘too many have been killed’. The ‘very small recession’ may already be over amid ‘distinct signs of an upturn’, Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, told a Commons committee. Provisional figures for the last quarter of 2023 had shown a 0.3 per cent fall in GDP, following a